Legislators Confront Budget Crisis with Few Answers

At a lively legislative breakfast Saturday lawmakers from both sides of the aisle agreed that a legacy of debt, along with diminished legislative control over the state’s budget, has created a major fiscal crisis that may well result in rising property taxes for Connecticut’s homeowners. 

More than 50 people attended the annual League of Women Voters (LWV) breakfast at the Evergreen Woods retirement community in North Branford. There they listened and questioned the men and women who represent them in Hartford. Carol Reimers, president of the LWV of the East Shore, welcomed the group.

“We don’t support candidates or parties, but we are passionate about issues,” she told the audience. So were the Democratic and Republican legislators who minced no words about the issues before them this legislative session, issues that had just gotten worse the day before the event.

The day before Gov. Dannel P. Malloy announced plans to shift nearly one-third of the annual cost of municipal schoolteachers’ pensions onto cities and towns. That’s about $407.6 million. Click on the story’s interactive map for information about Branford and other towns and cities. Until Malloy’s proposal pension costs were borne fully by the state. Malloy said in a number of speeches that prior governors had failed to contribute state funds to the legally mandated pension funds. 

Shifting Pension Costs to Towns and Cities

Malloy said last week, ​“Teachers and school administrators are, after all, municipal employees. The state does not pay for pensions for other groups, not police, not firefighters, no other group of town employees does the state establish a pension system for.”

While the budget Malloy proposes Wednesday may add other dimensions to the funding issues, the legislators attending the Saturday session were absorbing the enormity of towns and cities paying for one-third of the funding of the Connecticut State Teachers’ Retirement System. Currently the state picks up the whole tab. This fund oversees benefits for the state’s 36,000 retired teachers, with 50,000 active teachers, school administrators and their beneficiaries expecting their pension benefits when they retire.

State Sen. Ted Kennedy, Jr. (12th Senate District) and State Reps Vincent Candelora (R‑86), North Branford and North Guilford; Sean Scanlon (D‑98), Guilford and two sections of Branford); Noreen Kokoruda (R‑101), Madison; and Jesse Maclachlan, (R‑35), Clinton, Killingworth and Westbrook left no doubt that the budget was front and center. Three other area legislators, including state Rep. Lonnie Reed of Branford, could not attend the breakfast this year.

Kennedy said, ​“Clearly the overarching issue that faces our state is our economic condition, our state budget. Since I arrived in Hartford (in 2014) we have had to cut nearly $2 billion from our state budget. This is the circumstance we face.”

Candelora, the senior legislator on the forum, is entering his 11th year in office. ​“The budget process is the most critical issue we face in the state,” he said. He was concerned about another issue, as well. ​“As the deficit grows,” he observed, ​“we are losing our legislative capacity” to govern. The budget is left up to the governor,” he said.

Scanlon told the audience that not contributing to the pension pot began with Republican governors. ​“A legacy of debt continued,” he added. He urged everyone in the room to read a five-part series on the state’s budget recently published by the CT Mirror. ​“The decisions the legislature makes in the next four or five months will be based on the reality this legislature has inherited, not created,” Scanlon said.

John Hartwell, a guest at the breakfast, lives in Westport but will soon be moving to Branford. He sits on the Westport Board of Finance. He quickly raised his hand. ​“I am looking at the budget book for my finance board this weekend. I see funds from state education funding are gone. Completely wiped out. How do we deal with our budget with no education funds?”

Kokoruda told Hartwell that when the governor decides his budget deals the governor does so ​“without any legislators in the room. I asked Ben Barnes and he said, we can’t discuss it, we can’t discuss it,” she said, referring to Malloy’s Secretary of the Office of Policy and Management.

Scanlon reminded everyone in the room ​“that about 80 percent of the budget you can’t cut or you shouldn’t cut. So a lot of cuts that we have to make to balance the budget come from 20 percent of the budget and that 20 percent of the budget is being pummeled by repeated cuts. We continue to make cuts in that small 20 percent and it is very, very challenging.

“In 1997, then Gov. Rowland agreed with the unions to freeze their benefits for about 20 years. In 2011 Gov. Malloy renegotiated parts of it. But the unions don’t have to come to the table,” Scanlon pointed out. ​“They made some concessions a few years back and they think they made their fair share…To answer John’s question… I don’t have the answer.”

Kennedy said he thought ​“the general public needs to be more knowledgeable about the fix we are in as has been mentioned a couple of times, those costs that are locked in. We can’t get to the 80 percent.”

Goosing Up Pensions with Gas Mileage

Kennedy said he was distressed to learn one way that pensions get ​“goosed up” in the final years of service. 

“I just learned for the first time a couple of weeks ago that state legislators can put in for their mileage, can use their mileage to and from work toward their overall pension calculations.” He doesn’t begrudge his colleagues getting reimbursed for gas costs, he said, ​“but the idea that that could be used toward your overall pension calculation, that your mileage expense can be used to goose your pension payment, well, that was news to me”

He said he thought ​“the idea of increasing our co-pays for public employees are common sense ideas that I think many people do actually support. Look, our budget has to be sustainable. It has to be predictable and it has to be fair….we need to feel like we are in this together.”

Candelora said, ​“We are going to need bipartisan report support? on this budget. You know the state of Rhode Island was able to turn things around. And the unions need to know we don’t have a choice, we really are bankrupt in our entire system.” He said there are ways to do this without harming state employees, perhaps by increasing medical co-pays.

Look to the Roads

Kennedy continued to push for better high-speed rail service between Connecticut and New York City. Reducing the time it takes to commute to New York City, he said, ​“will dramatically impact property values in our state and impact economic climate in our state.” He is hopeful that he can gain bipartisan support for tolls.

“Drivers fill up in Rhode Island and they drive right on through and they don’t spend one nickel for the maintenance of our roads. I think tolls (at borders) are a good place to start.” One guest (pictured) stood to agree with Kennedy, sharing his story of driving 400 miles from Connecticut to New York to New Jersey without paying one toll in Connecticut, but stopping often to pay for bridge and road tolls. 
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